Looks like Boxee will release an iPhone App to control its upcoming set-top box, developed jointly with D-Link. The App will be on display at CES next week. Oh, God, CES is next week. With any luck Las Vegas will mysteriously disappear à la “Lost” before the show starts. That would truly be ideal. → Read More
The US e-reader market is about to get one more player when Dulin’s Books brings its Boox 60 reader to the States in the middle of January. But even though it packs a lot of tech into its shell like W-Fi, Wacom technology, and a Webkit browser, chances are it won’t ever make it mainstream thanks to the Kindle, Nook, and Reader. → Read More
When Swype was nice enough to give us the world’s first hands-on with their ultra-nifty alternative keyboard on the Android platform, I wasn’t about to leak the installation files. It’s just not my style. Now that someone else has gone and leaked them, though, I’m more or less obligated to show you how to get it up and running. I tell you, folks — this blogging thing is one endless inner conflict. → Read More
“Hey guys, what’s going on? Talking about secret company stuff? Cool. Don’t mind me. Just gonna heat up these SpaghettiOs real quick. Anyone do anything illegal lately?”
For $100, now YOU can be the creepy tattle tale at your workplace. → Read More
I usually avoid posting rumors started by analysts, because it seems like most have the batting average of a dizzy, blindfolded toddler. Alas, with CES just days away, everything worth writing about is being kept under tight lock and key; at this point, any big leaks would be like somebody ruining a surprise party by shouting “THERE’S A SURPRISE PARTY IN THERE” as the special guest walks up the driveway. Global Equities Research analyst Trip Chowdhry,who at least has some sort of history with Motorola predictions, has a few guesses as to what Motorola will be announcing next week. → Read More
The third (and likely final) batch of 150 tickets to attend the Crunchies Awards are on sale now, courtesy of Eventbrite. Balcony seats are $45 (orchestra is sold out.)
If you’re dead set on an orchestra seat, please contact Jeanne Logozzo for sponsorship options. We have creative packages available in all shapes and sizes, such as champagne cocktails, card-game tables, demo tables, photo booths or walls, product giveaways and more.
Remember that voting is open through midnight PST, Wednesday, January 6. Everyone is eligible and encouraged to vote daily for their favorite people, products and companies of the year.
The Crunchies Awards celebrate the best tech accomplishments of 2009 and will be held at the Herbst Theater in San Francisco on Friday, January 8, 2010 at 7:30 pm PST. Along with our co-hosts, GigaOm and VentureBeat, we will announce the winners from 18 different award categories live on stage from over 125 finalists. → Read More
Ah, here’s a pretty nice deal for Family Guy fans. You can get the new special edition Family Guy Presents: Something Something Something Dark Side Star Wars spoof on DVD for $12.49 but when you buy that DVD plus Season 7 of Family Guy, the total is just $17.48. → Read More
A big problem almost any robot nowadays has is limited agility. While this isn’t an issue for industrial and other “practical” robots, humanoids can only move in a slow, mechanical and chopping motion. Honda’s Asimo, for example, is considered super-advanced, but doesn’t move too elegantly either.
But Japan-based Himeji Softworks raises the bar in that area. Their JO-ZERO robot kit shows we haven’t reached that Nureyev level of elegance yet either, but it’s pretty impressive, especially since it’s the brainchild of a small venture. It can break-dance (sort of) and pull off a number of cool stunts. → Read More
If you like pink, you can save a heap on Sony’s 10.1-inch VAIO W netbook. The Microsoft Store is selling it for just $374.25 with free shipping. The same netbook is available in white for $499. → Read More
Times Square was evacuated earlier today when the bomb squad was called in to inspect a suspicious parked van. It turned out to be nothing, but as people were scrambling for information they would have been better off doing a search on Bing than on Google. A search for “Times Square” on Google about 15 minutes after I saw my first Tweet about it turned up two-day old news results up top about New Year’s Eve preperations and generic photos of Times Square, whereas a search on Bing at least had relevant headlines from ABC News (“NYPD: No Bomb Inside Van Abandoned in Times Square”) and CNN (“Police investigate van parked in Times Square”).
Of course, Google was perfectly capable of showing the best realtime results. The problem is that the best results were hidden on Google’s realtime updates page (click “Show options” and then “Updates” on any search), and Bing’s Twitter search page, which combines Tweets with headlines. I learned about the bomb scare and subsequent reopening of Times Square on Twitter before it even hit most news sites. But the next thing I did was search on Google. If you look now, Google is finally showing the right news results, but the screenshot above is what I saw when I searched, along with what I saw immediately after on Bing. → Read More
This is a video showing BlueMaemo, an application that allows you to control your PS3 with a Nokia N900. Well, it will allow you to control any number of devices, it’s just that there’s a video of it interacting with a PS3. All hail mighty Bluetooth, king of the wireless protocols. → Read More
Charlie Rose welcomed Zynga CEO Mark Pincus on his show last night for a 15 minute interview. Pincus says 60-70 million people a day are playing social games on Facebook and MySpace, and 1%-2% are willing to shell out actual cash to enhance gameplay. Mobile social gaming is still small, just 5 million – 6 million/ day, he says. But mobile is a fast growing platform.
Pincus brought in a printed out screen of a CafeWorld game they created for Rose. Pincus, President Obama and Hillary Clinton are waiters in the cafe. Rose is the cook.
Up to half of all user time spent on social networks is spent playing games, says Pincus.
Pincus says his business model is direct payments for enhanced gameplay, and virtual gifts. What didn’t come up at all was Scamville. Rose also steered clear of the growing financial ties between Facebook and Zynga.
The video and transcript are below. → Read More
Startup Twilio has raised $3.7 million in Series A funding from Union Square Ventures. The startup previously raised $600,000 in seed funding from The Founders Fund, David Cohen, Mitch Kapor, Manu Kumar Chris Sacca, and other angel investors. Twilio creates a powerful API for phone services that allows developers to quickly integrate telephony functionality into their apps. The company plans to use the new funding for growth in sales and marketing and to further the development of new products. Union Square Ventures’ Albert Wenger and Founders Fund’s Dave McClure will be joining the startup’s board.
The Twilio service allows developers to integrate common phone actions (like placing calls or playing back a recording) using a small set of basic API commands. Building basic projects, like this Rick Roll app, takes only a few lines of code, though developers can create far more advanced applications. In fact, Twilio’s early customers include Cheetos, Earth911, Tumblr, and Sony Music. Twilio’s CEO Jeff Lawson says that the service has also gained traction in the political world. Lawson says that one of the major political parties (he declined to name which one), is using Twilio for advocacy efforts. → Read More
Everyone’s favorite man-child of indeterminate age or nationality, DiiFii, takes an adrenaline-fueled look at Tekken 6 in his latest review. [YouTube] → Read More
The idea of a life recorder that captures every moments of your life on video is still a bit of a tech fantasy, but an early version of the life recorder already exists. It is called Evernote, the popular iPhone (and now Android) app which lets you record your memories by snapping geo-tagged photos, making voice notes, or just text notes and making it easy to search through them. Evernote does not yet support video recording other than as an attachment (for premium subscribers), but when that becomes more practical it will.
“Evernote is definitely positioned to be the lifelogging tool of choice,” says CEO Phil Libin. “That ambient video capture was my original plan for Evernote—always recording, not storing, you bookmark it—that is exactly what we want to do.” Next year Evernote will introduce voice search, which will be a big step towards that ultimate vision (if you can search audio, you can search through what was said in videos). But full life recording is still a few years out. For now, Libin is more focussed on polishing his current product as it enters the mainstream.
Evernote just reached 2 million unique users, only 7 months after reaching its first million. It took Evernote half the time (233 days) to get to the second million milestone than it did the first million (433 days). → Read More
A-DATA is looking to the future with the N002. The flash drive kicks it with both USB 3.0 and SATA II interfaces, which means that it must be fast. And it is, friends. A-DATA is claiming it’s really fast. → Read More
Steam has been running a huge sale the last few days, (Bioshock for $5, oh yes) but a Reddit user is urging gamers to look past the six headline titles and to indie games. He’s right. There are a bunch of games I’ve never heard of for only a few dollars right now. If you’re like me and already played-through MW2, Borderlands, Batman, and L4D2, spend $10 and pick up a couple of these. I don’t know which ones are any good, but take a chance and you might get a winner — and it makes the gaming gods smile that you’re helping indie developers. Feel free to drop recommendations in the comments after the jump. → Read More
The numbers are in. And they look good. It appears that online holiday spending rose slightly this year, by 5 percent, to $27 billion for the shopping season from November 1 through Christmas Eve, according to comScore. For the time period from Black Friday through Christmas Eve, sales showed a slight uptick, rising 3.5 percent. With respect to individual product categories, consumer electronics saw yearly sales growth of slightly over 20 percent, while sales of jewelry and watches also rose.
From reports over the past few months, the numbers indicated that the total online spending would be higher this year than last, when the U.S. spending was blindsided with a crippling recession. The final shopping weekend before Christmas saw a 13 percent growth rate in online spending from the previous year, thanks to the wintry mess that hit the Eastern Seaboard. And the full week posted a 6 percent yearly increase in spending, setting a one-week sales record with more than $4.8 billion in spending. Online sales numbers from Black Friday and Cyber Monday also appeared to be stronger than last year. → Read More
SpinVox, a London-based technology startup that transcribes voicemails to text so that they can be more easily digitized, searched, and manipulated, has been acquired by speech recognition company Nuance for $102.5 million. We reported on the rumors of the acquisition a few weeks ago, when a $150 million price tag was floating around.
Nuance will integrate SpinVox’s services with its speech recognition platform. SpinVox, which has raised close to $200 million in funding, develops both web apps, including Spin-My-Blog and Facebook and Twitter integration, and mobile technologies. SpinVox has partnerships with a number of mobile carriers, mostly in Europe, including O2, Vodafone, Orange, T-Mobile, 3, and Virgin Mobile. → Read More
Earlier this evening Gizmodo published leaked images that apparently show off the pricing details for Google’s upcoming Nexus One phone. The Nexus One comes in at a hefty $530 for an unlocked device, or $180 with contract on T-Mobile — pricing that’s pretty standard for a smart phone. But even still, it’s a very big deal. It also looks like Gizmodo’s screenshots may have included clues hinting at a previously unannounced feature for Android: automatic backup of your data. → Read More
